Delano J. McFarlane, MEng., MPhil.
PhD Candidate
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
622 W. 168th Street, VC 5th Floor
New York, NY 10032
delano@dbmi.columbia.edu
Research InterestsMy primary research area is Public Health Informatics. I performing research in the automated analysis of health news coverage. I have built SalientNews, a news aggregation and analysis system that uses natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) methods to identify trends in the media's coverage of health topics. My thesis research is the developement and evaluation of text classification systems that can automatically categorize health news articles based on health topic (e.g. obesity, cancer), the population being discussed (e.g. latinos, african americans, women, children), and health news framing (e.g. personal responsibility, environmental risk, biological causation). I am making use of supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques and information retrieval methods in this research. Some of the methods I am using are cluster analysis, latent semantic analysis (LSA), novel phrase detection and language modeling. Ultimately I hope to create tools that researchers and health news consumers can use to better access and navigate health news coverage.In addition I am interested in the effective use and impact of newer web technologies both in Public Health Informatics and in other biomedical informatics areas. In particular, web 2.0 technologies, design paradigms and applications hold great promise for use in areas ranging from health literacy and health promotion to the improved Human Computer Interface (HCI) design of clinical information systems. Social networking, collaborative content creation, content sharing and collective social knowledge web sites have tranformed the landscape of the internet and will soon have a similar tranformative impact on the ways in which people interact with health information. The GetHealthyHarlem.org is a project that I am involved with that leverages social collaboration technologies to promote health in the Harlem NYC community. |
BackgroundI received my Bachelors and Masters of Engineering in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995 and 1996. As an undergraduate my interests were Computer Systems, Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence. My Masters of Engineering Thesis was the design and implementation of a multi-threaded raytracing algorithm for the rendering of 3-dimensional scenes.I worked in the software and internet development industries for a number of years. I first interned as a product manager at Microsoft. I worked as a consultant for Oracle Corporation and then later for Technology Solutions Company. During the height of the dot com boom I worked as a software engineer and engineering manager at DoubleClick and then as a system architect at an internet startup named MetaRun. I later worked as an architect, engineer and manager at RightMedia. I have also developed a number of software applications used for data analysis and data acquisition in physiological research. The software that I have developed is in use on a number of academic research projects at Columbia University as well as other research facilities across the country. |
AwardsThe National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities Dissertation Award, Sep, 2009 |
PublicationsPerplexity Analysis of Obesity News Coverage. McFarlane DJ, Elhadad N., Kukafka R., AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2009 Nov 12A vector space method to quantify agreement in qualitative data. McFarlane DJ, Ancker J, Kukafka R.(McFarlane & Ancker have equal authorship), AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2008 Nov 6:455-9 Perceived Racism And Negative Affect: Analysis Of Trait And State Measures Of Affect In A Community Sample Brondolo, Elizabeth; Brady, Nisha; Thompson, Shola; Tobin, Jonathan N.; Cassells, Andrea; Sweeney, Monica; McFarlene, Delano; Contrada, Richard J.. Journal of Social & Clinical Psychology, Feb2008, Vol. 27 Issue 2, p150-173 Using term frequency to identify trends in the media's coverage of health McFarlane DJ, Kukafka R., AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2007 Oct 11:1045. download Healthy Harlem: empowering health consumers through social networking, tailoring and web 2.0 technologies. Khan SA, McFarlane DJ, Li J, Ancker JS, Hutchinson C, Cohall A, Kukafka R., AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2007 Oct 11:1007. Digital partnerships for health: steps to develop a community-specific health portal aimed at promoting health and well-being. Kukafka R, Khan SA, Hutchinson C, McFarlane DJ, Li J, Ancker JS, Cohall A., AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2007 Oct 11:428-32. |
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